First and foremost, we need to abolish the laws that caused
this all to happen. Yes, that’s right – all of this was
required to happen, by law. Many people think that sprawl is
a free market phenomenon, and they are exactly wrong. Sprawl
is caused by the following policies – I call these Sprawl
Laws; you can find them for yourself in your local city code
(for the most succinct explanation, see this paper[1]):
* Zoning
* Setbacks
* Minimum parking requirements
* Minimum lot sizes
* Maximum units per lot
* Minimum road widths
Add school district zoning into the mix, and you have the full recipe for where our cities are today.
It's interesting that some of the most charming neighborhoods in the country (e.g. Chelsea in New York, DuPont in D.C.) were built before all that crap. You'd never build a "modern city" like Philadelphia, with its narrow one-way streets, lack of parking, and commercial and retail mish-mashed together. But most of the rest of the country feels dead in comparison.
Of course, the issue is not zoning laws, but bad zoning laws. European zoning laws are mostly concerned with actual urban planning. US zoning laws are focused on maintaining property values.
Read e.g. "Zoned in the USA"[1] for a nice introduction to the topic.
At least in Stockholm all the most desirable locations would be illegal to build today for dozens of reasons. Meanwhile, newly built areas range from awful to tolerable.
> You'd never build a "modern city" like Philadelphia, with its narrow one-way streets, lack of parking, and commercial and retail mish-mashed together.
And yet, that’s what’s being built in most of europe.
Make streets smaller, remove parking, build mixed use buildings.
I stay far far far away from the dense cities. I can't stand those places.
I'm quite happy with the way in the US you can pick where you want to live - anything from superdense, to urban, to suburban, to rural.
Whatever you like, there's a city that will match you.
Even better is how in some cities there is a mix, all within 50 miles of each other you have all the types. You get the benefit of business city center without actually having to live there.
That's fine, so long as you're willing to pay for your infrastructure. Low-density suburbs with full utilities, storm sewer, etc, must have it's cost paid for by those who choose to live that lifestyle.
Those of us living 27 stories up are more efficient and shouldn't have to pay for your roads.
Because you grow crops on the roof, weave cotton in the basement, and build for furniture on another for? Roads are used for more than moving people around, they also move good around,which almost everyone partakes.
>Because you grow crops on the roof, weave cotton in the basement, and build for furniture on another for?
There's this thing that lets you present those expenses to consumers - it's called pricing.
You have to pay more for road maintenance - you raise prices to cover it - I now see the actual cost of your product instead of it being subsidized by my tax money regardless of using them.
A vanishingly small proportion of suburbanites farms, weaves or works in furniture factories. Indeed I wouldn't be amazed if more apartment-dwellers are engaged in those activities than McMansionites.
It seems to me that both urban and suburban landlords charge what they can get away with (aka "what the market will bear",) which is a much larger number in sought-after urban areas than in the suburbs. The kind of subsidies you talk about may also exist, but they're not the primary factor.
Except you can't. Your choices in the US are almost always suburban to rural, especially if a) you don't have a lot of money to afford the desirable urban areas and b) you don't want to deal with the crime in the undesirable ones.
I love cities. But I'm having a hard time with so-called "urbanist" people/policies.
A lot of the philosophy boils down to intentionally make life harder for anyone who isn't living in Downtown urban cores -- areas so expensive, no one who works for a living can ever afford them.
Effectively, they want to punish poor and middle class people simply for being poor and middle class, through the design of the place we all live in. Which is counter to the whole point of cities in the first place.
For a year in 2003-4, I lived in a newly-built (maybe 3 years old?) rented apartment near the center of Oxford (right next to the railway station). The developer had only been allowed to include 8 parking spaces (between 50-100 flats). Nearby street parking was all resident-permit-only, and residents of these newly-built flats were not eligible to get residents' permits for any street parking.
This prevented anyone living in any of those flats from owning a car without serious hassle or cost. I owned a car at the time, so didn't like it. In retrospect, it seems like a great policy: allow new housing to be built, but don't externalise the costs of parking cars.
I live in a neighborhood Denver where many of the houses were built in the 1880s and 90s and it's utterly charming. Houses of various sizes and shapes, some single-family, some multi-tennant. It's even more interesting than the Chicago neighborhood where I lived in the nineties (and which also dated from the late 1800s).
> charming neighborhoods in the country (e.g. Chelsea in New York
That's charming to you???? Looking at photos of it gives me the creeps. How can people stand to live in places like that?
> But most of the rest of the country feels dead in comparison.
?????
The rest of the country feels open and alive, not crowded and oppressive.
I've very glad that in the US you can pick and choose what you like, and it's not all a monoculture. You live in a density you like and I'll live in one I like.
But please don't go out and advocate for more of what you like while pretending other people's desires are somehow "bad".
I think "desire" has little to do with it. Right now in my age demographic tons of friends are gnashing their teeth because "public transit" and "decent schools" are apparently incompatible among American urban planners.
And suburban sprawl is hardly "open and alive." Here in NoVA it's just mile after mile of asphalt and concrete with most of the greenery strategically planted as highway noise breaks and to separate subdivisions. If you want to see "open and alive" go to cities in Europe. If you start driving out of Amsterdam, it's crazy how quickly you're in the middle of dairy farms.
It's typical of people from both the East Coast and West Coast to think their experiences are representative of the whole country...
Just like it's silly for me to say everyone from the coasts ignores the middle, it's silly for you to imagine that everywhere is like Northern Virginia.
> It's typical of people from both the East Coast and West Coast to think their experiences are representative of the whole country...
I think you have good intentions, but this comes across as pretty insensitive. Rayiner isn't saying every corner of the USA is sprawling suburbia; only that the huge NoVA sprawl outside of D.C. contributes against the average sprawling suburbia from being considered "open and alive". It's a debatable point without labeling huge groups of people.
I did have a second paragraph, short as it was, noting how silly it is to paint with such a broad brush.
Whatever makes the difference (zoning, local culture and traditions, socioeconomic status, ...), there are good and bad suburban areas; they aren't all lifeless, even if they do seem to stretch on forever in places.
Edit to add: suburban areas aren't meant to be experienced from a distance, viewing from the freeway. Looking from a distance at sprawling neighborhoods won't give one a good impression of what it's like to live in one of those neighborhoods.
In my exurban town, all that's paid by either property taxes or my utility payments. (Plus local schools--which I don't use but are far and away the largest cost applied against my property taxes.) I also pay for private trash collection and my own septic.
Imputing the costs of roads is more difficult although I'd note my town is only about 25 years newer than Boston so it's hardly a case of recent sprawl.
So one side of the street is big box stored with giant parking lots, and the other side is parking garages with 1st floor businesses. Looks 1000% for cars and not transit.
I wouldn't conclude much from that development which is largely a retail and restaurant development in a long rundown industrial area (former Ford plant). [1] It was basically cut off from most of Sommerville by highways. There was long a plan to put an Ikea there but there was a lot of pushback from various groups and Ikea eventually walked.
Much of Sommerville away from the highways is essentially a gentrifying, historically somewhat downmarket, version of Cambridge. Generally low-rise houses and some condo complexes.
>I have walked around assembly row and it isn't terrible but it certainly doesn't feel like downtown Boston.
A new development shouldn't feel like the downtown from one of the oldest cities in the country. Age, architecture, construction materials, land and building re-use, and about a thousand other things can't be faked.
That doesn't mean they didn't build with these principles in mind.
That feels like it could be anywhere. I was in Boston last weekend in the Copley Square area, which I liked very much but my impression is it's very expensive.
Most of Boston is very expensive--and certainly the Back Bay. (Which is actually urban planning on landfill from the late 1800s--hence the streets that don't look like cow paths.) The new development (including highrises) is mostly clustered around the Seaport but that's actually apparently even more expensive these days.
I honestly don't get the appeal of Assembly Row. It reminds me of Bellevue, WA or the new developments in northern Virginia. Sprawling parking lots and boring outlets. Not really what I want the Boston area to become.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the mortgage interest tax deduction as a contributor to sprawl. I.e. federally subsidized home ownership. Talk about reasons to ditch your downtown rental and borrow against a grassy slice of suburban land.
More like federally subsidized mortgage lending. It's like health insurance or any other market with a locked-in consumer base: putting more money the demand side en masse doesn't improve supply, it just increases the prices.
What Houston lacks in zoning laws, it makes up for with many, if not most, neighborhoods being "deed restricted" communities. For residents, this is effectively the same as zoning. From the city website (http://www.houstontx.gov/legal/deed.html):
"Restrictions mean limitations that:
-Affect the use to which real property may be put;
-Fix the distance that a structure must be set back from property lines, street lines, or lot lines;
-Affect the size of a lot or the size, type and number of structures that may be built on the lot;
-Regulate orientation of a structure; or
-Regulate certain fences requiring a building permit."
Sometimes these things get too extreme, but they do have valid reasons.
Zoning should be obvious. Do you mind if I build a solid rocket factory next to your house, complete with test stand and storage of enough ammonium perchlorate to register on the Richter scale if it goes boom? (see the PEPCON disaster, which was 3 to 3.5 on the Richter scale)
Setbacks, minimum lot sizes, and maximum units per lot are needed for drainage. It costs lots more money to run storm drains.
Setback requirements keep your neighbors from blocking your view. Suppose you buy a house in a normal suburban place, 100 feet back from the road. Your neighbors decide to extend their houses or build new ones, going right up to the street. You'd be pissed that they blocked off most of your light. Manhatten even has similar requirements for skyscrapers, imposed after one wise guy built right up to the street and blocked out the Sun.
Minimum parking requirements stop all sorts of evil and unproductive behavior. In places without enough parking, much of the traffic is people driving around and around in search of parking. People hesitate to leave a good parking space. People doing business or living at one property will swipe the parking in front of a different property. Because of this swiping behavior, there is a huge disincentive to provide any parking at all.
Minimum road widths reduce driver stress. That stress increases heart attacks, divorce, and violence. Minimum road widths reduce fender-bender damage. Minimum road widths allow the movement of moving trucks, utility trucks, fire trucks, and garbage trucks.
* There are no rocket factories, yet
* There are some setbacks but not massive ones. They're half the size of a comparable neighbourhood in Toronto. We don't flood.
* Nobody's view is blocked
* Most people walk, rather than drive. There's not excessive car circulation compared to other neighborhoods.
* People are significantly more relaxed, and healthier, because they can walk rather than drive.
Plateau mont royal. Have a look at the place on Google maps. If we could clone this neighborhood and build it around the USA, developers would make trillions. It's very dense, yet families live here.
Also: How do we make a list on Hacker News? I've never figured this out.
>If this is true, why do cities built precar work?
A partial answer is that they have used zoning to externalize many of the services and production needed by the area built pre-car to areas built post-car. You don't have rocket factories in downtown Montreal precisely because zoning has created a more effective area for them somewhere else.
But most of your food, energy, and all things you use, all the physical goods come from somewhere else. And if people are like here, they whine about the transport of food to their local store when it's done by a van or something because they don't want vans, they just want food.
Anyway, it's telling that in many cities, some of the most desirable areas couldn't be built today due to construction and other codes. Not just parking, but also things like fire safety, energy efficiency and access for disabled people. Over here (Helsinki region), tiny downtown apartments are very fashionable but building them is absolute no-no, because
1) in an attempt to increase quality of housing stock, its forbidden to build apartments smaller than 20 m2, and a certain proportion must be over 75 m2 (or whatever, depends on zoning area)
2) in an attempt to give better access to handicapped people, every apartment must have a bathroom with floor space big enough to dance a waltz in a wheelchair; likewise, access only via stairs (typical in old, fashionable and popular sites) is not allowed
3) ratios of window form factor and apartment depth are specified in code
4) every apartment needs to provide bomb shelter capacity for residents
5) for fire safety, it must be possible to drive up a fire truck with ladder/crane and lift out any people from every apartment via windows/balconies
6) modern energy saving and health requirements mandate electronically guided ventilation which makes re-construction of "old" style houses unfeasible
etc.
The parking norms get most attention, because cars are a convenient target, but there are also many other things that are simply making old-style neighbourhoods impossible.
You are completely forgetting about voluntary restrictions on land use via mechanisms like Homeowners' Associations. Want to enforce setback on your new development? Fine. But how do you know that setback is what everyone in the whole city needs?
Some of the logic behind the incentivization of all this was to make the US less vulnerable to nuclear attack during the Cold War. Basically it would be harder to kill all of us if we were more spread out.
Houston is an interesting counterpoint to your argument that zoning and taxes caused sprawl because what motivated Houston to exercise nearly unlimited annexation powers was racially motivated flight of the voter base. The result is 640 square miles of sprawl and much like Detroit Houston has no choice now but to cut services and raise taxes to maintain the infrastructure or retract city limits. You can imagine which they chose.
Well when those who have influence to block new higher density housing to be built inside of city limits and lower prices what other expected outcome could there be?
It is obvious there are some out there who would live in the city provided they could find a place they felt was worth the cost, provided the safety they require, and access to amenities they desire. However many cities have rule after rule to prevent such from being built or load on requires that blow the cost out by requiring specific number of low cost units forcing all other units up in price.
Most "sprawl" is new developments built in places where there are none of these zoning laws - no zoning, no setbacks, no parking requirements, nothing of that sort. After the sprawl is built, sometimes those rules are added, to keep it sprawly.
But no, zoning does not cause sprawl. Sprawl is farmland or forest land that has to be rezoned to be residential at all. Since you're far out from "the city", the property must be attractive to buyers to induce them to live there. Since land is cheap there, this inducement takes the form of large houses and expansive stretches of land.
If you built tiny, expensive, inner-city studio apartments that were ALSO 60 minutes away from "the city", who would buy them?
> Many people think that sprawl is a free market phenomenon, and they are exactly wrong.
People but their exurban houses, forgetting that everyone else also buys an exurban house and they don't get the idyllic pastoral life they imagined. Instead they sit parked on the highway.
The author never made the case that a property owner is SUPPOSED to pay for the cost of the street, so I'm not even motivated to figure out whether the analysis is correct or not.
The government is not a bank. You're not supposed to "get out what you put in" or "pay for what you use." The government provides things for the public good: roads, education, police, military, etc.
Of course some government is a Ponzi scheme in the sense that some people "pay for more than they use." That's called progressive taxation. So if the evil sprawlsters are subsidizing the older roads...so what? The evil sprawlsters can afford it.
It would be just as ridiculous to write an article about how "people with children in schools aren't paying the cost of the school" or good grief even "people who have a fire aren't paying the cost of the fire department." Roads are provided for the public good.
So it really doesn't matter that the author doesn't even address the fact that many of these supposedly deadbeat property owners are paying a whole bunch of taxes that are keeping the city of Ames afloat, along with its supposedly inaccurate road tax scheme.
> The author never made the case that a property owner is SUPPOSED to pay for the cost of the street, so I'm not even motivated to figure out whether the analysis is correct or not.
It's worth reading up on Joseph Stiglitz's work in the 1970s that demonstrated how government spending in public goods is transformed exactly into land rents under many conditions.[0]
The author was addressing the opposite situation -- people using more than what they pay for.
> It would be just as ridiculous to write an article about how "people with children in schools aren't paying the cost of the school"
A more similar analogy to what the author was pointing out would be that current taxpayers will receive more Social Security benefit over their lifetimes than the future value of their lifetime payments, meaning that the system is only financially sound if we assume the working population will grow at an appropriate rate such that we'll always have enough workers to pay for retirees.
Or, adjusting the analogies you provided: we are borrowing from other countries to pay for our schools and fire departments. This happens to be true. Is it bad? Unknown.
Not the working population, simply the tax revenue.
You could theoretically have one robot producing trillions of $ and tax that one robot and pay for everything.
That's one of the reasons why everyone's obsessed with growth, if the economy grows, the tax budget goes up without tax rates going up so the country can afford to pay for more stuff.
Good point. That's why it's likely the youth and the not-yet-born will pay a higher percent of their lifetime incomes in taxes while probably receiving less benefit. Americans have a history of voting wealth transfers to themselves from their grandchildren.
So if the evil sprawlsters are subsidizing the older roads...so what? The evil sprawlsters can afford it.
I think you (and probably the author) have got this exactly backwards. Sprawl creates blight when the rate of building outpaces the needs of population growth. The evil sprawlsters are creating new costs, but they aren't subsidizing old roads. The sprawl usually happens outside of long-ago drawn city borders, anyway.
If you have 5 families living in 5 houses in the urban core and you build 5 new houses for them to live in out in the suburbs, then population needs to double for there to be full occupancy.
As a case study, take a look at my home town of St. Louis. Much has been made about the city's population loss. But that's just in the urban core; the region's population has actually grown slightly over the last 40 years. It just hasn't grown fast enough to fill up all the new houses we've built out across the river.
The sprawlsters aren't subsidizing the old roads. They have completely abandoned them and are leaving them to nature.
St. Louis City also has a problem with its beloved "earnings tax".
At one point as our office space lease renewal was approaching I plotted all of our 100+ employees at the time on a map, almost all software engineers, about 2/3 of them lived west of the city and 1/3 lived east, and only a single one lived in the city, and he was in a temporary apartment immediately post divorce, didn't get the house. To me that says 99+% of professionals don't want to live in the city. Our first office plan had been to put one in the city, but the earnings tax on our side and the employee's side was a deal breaker for a business with payroll as its predominant expense. So instead we got an office on each side of the river and teleported across the city as needed with the interstate highway system.
The fact that burbs are the most desirable places to live in STL is pretty much the reason I'll never move back. It's an incredibly depressing metro area.
There's a lot of city-living worship here. But (as would certainly be the case with myself) it's mostly for a very tiny number of mostly coastal cities.
You need to think bigger than the earnings tax (or any any particular difference between the City and the County). That's too narrow a lens through which to see what's really going on.
St. Louis as a region has a problem with the sort of divisions that allowed you to avoid the earnings tax by locating outside of city limits that were myopically drawn in 1876.
---
(But, if I must comment on the earnings tax -- and I really can't help myself -- I'll simply say that a 1% tax is not enough to dissuade a professional earning a professional's income from living where they truly want to live or working where they truly want to work. To the extent that a 1% tax actually is a deal-breaker, it's a symptom of a much larger disease.)
Depends where you live and when you drive. Stay out of the evening rush hour in certain areas of town and you can count on 65mph to your destination. If you are popping across the river in the middle of the day there is no problem. Some people do have jobs that turn them out a 4-5pm in unfortunate locations. When I worked in one of those locations I shifted my schedule a bit so I worked until 6pm instead. Waiting 60 minutes turned a 45 minute commute into a 15 minute commute.
Some American cities have seen significant population declines since their infrastructure was built and thus have surplus transportation/housing/etc capacity.
You seem to be reading a tone into this article that I'm not. I didn't perceive a complaint that people don't pay for what they use, I perceived a complaint that the city of Ames is spending a huge portion of their budget on roads that may or may not be necessary. Putting the cost of these roads in terms of property tax is an interesting way of looking at this problem, which doesn't necessarily imply that everyone has to pay for their share of the road in full.
The point, as I read it, is this only works as long as there is enough growth to pay for upkeep of older infrastructure. The second the growth slows, or even stops, there's trouble. And nobody is arguing you should only get out what you put in, but on average, if property taxes are barely high enough to pay for the street in front of that house, it's obvious there will be a problem.
That taxes go to pay for things the gov't provides is clearly presupposed. You seem to be saying things that the gov't provides don't have costs associated with them.
It’s simple – here’s how it works:Say a community is built in Year 1.The community’s streets need to be rebuilt every 30 years.In Year 30 a new, identical community is built. Now twice the amount of taxes are coming, and so for time being the property owners only need to pay half the amount.And 30 years later, in Year 60, two new communities are built; as long as the number of properties and property taxes are doubling every 30 years, they can continue to pay half the amount.
Year 1, one community (community A), over the next 30 years is going to pay for 1 community's worth of roads (call it a 30 year loan given on day 1, let's say 1M dollars). So, the cost for community A is 1M dollars for 30 community-years of roads.
Year 30, we add a new community B to the mix. This community needs its own roads, so it needs a loan for 1M dollars it will pay off over the next 30 years. However, community A's roads have worn out. Community A just finished paying off their first loan, so they'll need a new one.
At year 60, we have paid 3M dollars, and gotten 90 "community-years" of roads out of it. This is no different than the equivalent end of the first year with one community, one loan, and 30 "community-years" of roads.
Community A doesn't take out a loan. The roads were built with exogenous funds. Starting in 30 years, Community A has to start paying X dollars a year in maintenance on it's roads. Community A taxes itself $X/2 per year and pays for a fire department with it.
In Year 30, Community B is built with exogenous funds. Starting in 30 years, Community B has to start paying $X a year in maintenance on it's roads. Community A has to raise taxes to $X, half of which goes to maintenance on it's roads and half of which goes to A's fire department, and Community B starts paying $X in taxes every year, half of which goes to maintenance on A's roads and half of which goes to B's fire department.
In Year 60, Community A and Community B each have to come up with an additional $X/2 per year in taxes or cut their fire departments.
Infrastructure is expensive to replace. These towns and cities are only able to afford to do so by making new subdivisions pay for it. This works so long as you keep growing exponentially, forever, which you won't. Someday, there won't be new people to pay for it.
City policies on this vary so much that it's impossible to generalize. That said, newer cities often end up forgetting that they need to pay for street reconstruction. The original cost of the street is usually included in the initial price of the house.
Sophisticated cities maintain a model (commonly called a pavement management program) that lets them predict future maintenance cost across the city.
He misses the fact that Ames does get tax money for street maintenance [1] and reconstruction [2]. His estimate for a properly maintained street is quite low -- other Midwestern US cities are able to get 60-70 years from their streets.
He also misses out on special assessments as a source of revenue -- which is very common for residential street projects.
>other Midwestern US cities are able to get 60-70 years from their streets.
By neglecting them when they are horribly cracked and potholed after 25 years. Then they make up for their long term "investment" in concrete by skim coating with asphalt.
If you're curious about your city, key question to ask is whether they have a pavement condition database. If they don't, they have no idea what the right amount of maintenance is. If they do, they should be able to predict whether they are spending at the right rate, and predict the same for the next several years.
Interesting article, and great visuals. The Sankey Diagram of the budget was very nice and of course all the interactive maps bear mentioning.
I think that anecdote about the "free" parking structure was really telling. The federal government swooped in and built a bunch of parking space then left the lesser governments squabbling over whose responsibility it wasn't.
More importantly, I think the best solution is to just pay more taxes. But "paying more taxes" seems to be antithetical to most Americans.
It's like the American Dream has just become "having nice things and not paying for them".
CA colleges are, for a number of reasons (prop 13, etc), in perpetual budget crises. A mother with a daughter in a UC was interviewed on tv whining about the impact of budget cuts on her daughter's education. After about a minute of this moron whinging, the reporter asked if she would be willing to pay a couple hundred dollars per year more in tax if it were dedicated to the UC system. Given my description of her, you know the answer: Of course not! We're overtaxed!
Most people are too stupid to understand that if we want nice things, we have to collectively pay for them. Though to be fair, there's plenty of politicians (see Republicans in Kansas, Louisiana, etc) telling people what they want to hear: tax cuts pay for themselves...
This might be unpopular, but California is a great example of a place where taxes are high, but it is not spent well. I remember looking at this a few years back, and although the state claims that 2/3 of state tax dollars goes towards education, a lot of it is supporting pensions and benefits of previous generation employees and teachers. While this is admirable, it essentially takes money away from today's generation for unsustainable promises made by unions and political leaders in the 80s and 90s. CA already has one of the highest marginal tax rates in the US of 9.5%, so it is understandable the woman does not want to pay more.
For schooling, Prop 13 is an even bigger issue. Even though property taxes are high for new buyers, schools are underfunded. Parents essentially are paying higher taxes in the form of fundraising to support science and other enrichment classes, which cannot be supported by the state. There were somewhat noble ideas behind Prop 13, but essentially what we have in California, is that newer residents of Californa bear a disproportionate amount of the burden.
While I'm with you on prop 13, we combine high income taxes with exceptionally low property taxes for long term property holders. Again, if we want nice things, we have to pay for them.
As for pensions, you say unsustainable promises, I say stealing from people who took cash later instead of cash immediately. Consider your last boss deciding to reach into your checking account and take $40k out because the business retroactively decided they overpaid.
The point is that the politicians back then stole from the future. If they were going to promise cash in the future the should have set aside money back then to pay for it.
It's one thing when a government borrows money to pay for a capital project that will last long after they are out of office. The net present value of an accruing pension is an operating cost and should be paid for as the obligation is incurred.
>As for pensions, you say unsustainable promises, I say stealing from people who took cash later instead of cash immediately.
This is really an accounting problem. In California, at least, changes to the pension system weren't reflected in the current budget as future obligations.
So for many years city and state controllers dealt with union demands by "off the books borrowing" in the form of more lavish pensions. City and state pensions really are unnecessarily lavish, and the reason is voters never realized what obligations they were being asked to shoulder.
They earned a promise from the government. That's not the same thing as earning the money, as many state and municipal employees will doubtless discover over the next few decades.
Yes. The government should have been made to put that money aside when they promised it. (Or at least to keep the commitment honestly on their books, instead of hiding it.)
What you're describing is a defined-contribution pension plan (like a 401(k) or an IRA) rather than a defined-benefit pension plan.
As I understand it, public employee unions have not been big fans of defined-contribution, preferring the more generous promises. That is a risk that both the union and the government take together.
You can still make it a defined-benefit plan. A defined benefit plan should be easy for the government to budget for---the benefits to be paid out are very easy to forecast. (And in essence equivalent to a bond, or perhaps annuity.)
"Budget" is the operative word there: Controlling the expenditure of tax dollars is one of the fundamental things elected officials do in a democracy. Thus current governments can't ever truly bind future ones.
Unless the money is in an account with your name on it, what you have is a political promise, not a contractual obligation or an asset.
If you're wanting to be fair, you should also bring up the very real (and reasonable) possibility that this woman would rather existing tax revenue be spent on education than some of the things it is currently being spent on.
There is nothing contradictory about feeling overtaxed and also feeling that insufficient tax revenue is being spent on education.
I'm not surprised at all that people would hold such contradictory views, simultaneously demanding tax cuts and service improvements, but it is surprising that someone could utter them in the same breath and keep a straight face.
Or is it knowledge that most of the cost are going to growing administrative costs and bureaucracies and not to actually provide the services they are their ostensibly to provide. It reminded me of when my home towns school district had budget cuts no one in the administrative side was let go but a dozen or so teachers where laid off. services are cut but administive side stay the same or grow.
I don't think people really understand where the money is going. I just looked at the numbers in the article, and I'm shocked that the upkeep of a little stretch of road in front of your house costs almost a thousand dollars a year. We just get used to that stuff being around and forget it costs money.
People think that way about all infrastructure, actually. "They want to raise water rates? What for?! We already pay $36/month!" Nobody thinks about the cost of digging up streets, replacing worn pipes, upgrading treatment plants, etc.
For some I'm sure it is, but I believe there's another facet to it: waste. A lot of tax revenue is totally wasted, and while some is almost certainly inevitable in an organization as large as the government, I strongly feel that no taxes should be raised or imposed until all reasonable avenues of reducing that have been pursued. For example, this should not be a thing: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08333.pdf
By setting up conditions that will never be met, you're insisting that taxes never be raised. Which is fine, but just honestly advocate for that. Also, that pdf is singularly stupid. Look at the first page: they found waste of $77k in the DoD! In a budget approaching one TRILLION dollars. There's always going to be a couple percent of waste; that's life in any big organization, public or private. Even if their 50% waste is accurate -- hell, even if it's 100% waste -- they're discussing $15B in a $3T federal budget -- half a percent.
any government budget is just too big to get any feeling for this imho. And you can either always argue that its just spend on the wrong things, like military, espionage, social security or that others are not paying enough, like Apple only paying very little taxes because they hoard their money abroad.
Yep, budget mismanagement and being underfunded are completely separate things. It's entirely possible that the "moron" woman interviewed believed that the budget was plenty, but being negligently mis-spent.
Most of them want nothing to do with actually understanding how their government works or how their money is spent, because they've been conditioned from a young age to believe that the government can't do anything right and anyone who works or receives benefits from the government is lazy and entitled. Some will even do the song and dance of telling everyone who will listen how private industry could do so much better, even though the average business in this country ends up being insolvent within a few years of beginning.
Their taxes will never be low enough because the service they receive will never meet their completely unrealistic standards.
As a cyclist, I get a lot of reasons I shouldn't be on the road thrown at me from people with uneducated opinions, but this one - this misconception right here that driving pays for roads, is the only one that makes my blood boil. I think if more people understood what actually pays for the roads it would cut down on the sense of entitled driving so many seem to have in general.
Admittedly it's more due to the UK's peculiar form of taxation (in a netshell: occupiers of houses pay "council tax" rather than owners paying "property tax"). But the website is a little dated, I hear they re-instated a ring-fenced sales tax on cars that will go towards road development.
There's this assumption that are $15-$18 per square foot. I'm no expert here, but I think that number might be roughly double what cities actually pay, based on this document from the State of Michigan : https://www.michigan.gov/documents/Vol2-40UIP16SubDevCosts-Y...
It's a decade old, but I'm seeing only $8/square foot cost, not $15+. Using the rest of the authors map + numbers, the majority of properties are now actually covering their street costs, with some room to spare for extras (such as curbs, sewers, sidewalks, etc, which suburban sprawl-type streets typically don't have).
Of course, Michigan roads are infamous for being terrible -- this might be the reason.
It might also be worth considering that a lot of high-end sprawl costs the city nothing in maintenance for their roads, since they are privately paved / plowed / maintained by HOAs.
This research seems more thorough, but still concludes that low-density developments often require much more than 30 years to pay off a road's 30-year lifecycle.
Edit: Looks like OP's calculations are based on how much of the collected taxes actually goes to the road budget.
> Of course, Michigan roads are infamous for being terrible -- this might be the reason.
This is a bit of a tangent, but Michigan actually has fairly high construction standards for roads. However, it also has one of the highest truck weight limits in the nation (over double the federal limit) and most road damage comes from heavy trucks.
CPI from 2003 to 2016 would bring that $8 up to $10.35, FWIW. And then, as you mentioned, road quality may come in to play. As would labor costs and other factors.
How are you arriving at $8? The footnote on page 2 puts it maybe close to that at minimum just for the construction (the article is including 30 years of maintenance).
I'm not including water mains, electricity, and gas mains. (Since they aren't really part of the street -- they generate their own revenue through usage charges + other taxes).
Here's another person also arriving at roughly $8/sqft in California :
I wonder if at some point we'll look back at the 20th century for what it was: a complete disaster of urban planning as sacrifice to the Church of the Car.
I live in NYC. It still befuddles me when I see people driving around Manhattan (why??). On a Saturday you can see traffic backed up half a mile to get to the Holland Tunnel. How was any of this not entirely foreseeable? Why do people endure it?
Anyway I discussed with someone how much space is allocated to free or highly subsidized parking. The going rate for land in Manhattan is >$600/sq ft now. Back-of-the-envelope estimates of the land dedicated to parking below 125th street puts the value of these parking spots at around $2 billion. A parking spot in prime real estate would be close to $100k. It's maintained by the city, chokes traffic and is given away for free (in a lot of cases). Why doesn't it generate revenues of $10k/year or roughly $30/day at the very minimum?
In most parts of the US living without a car is nigh-on-impossible. The dismantling of streetcars is many cities at the behest of the auto industry has been well-covered.
Something else I find interesting: the gun debate is contentious. Some argue guns make crime more likely. Others argue it's people not guns that are the problem.
Why isn't there this same debate about cars? I don't think they're inherently bad but you have to consider that the car made a lot of crimes possible that previously weren't (or at least weren't practical). Kidnappings, serial killings, bank robberies, burglaries, smuggling (eg cigarettes/alcohol across state lines) often feature a car or truck as a necessary component of the crime.
When people talk about crime getting worse over time, how much of this can be correlated with the ease and propensity of car ownership?
Anyway, as for urban planning, it's amazing how much people expect the city, state and Federal governments to subsidize their lifestyle choices with infrastructure like roads, sewer lines, water and the like. Rarely do these developments pay for their own infrastructure (it's at least subsidized to some degree).
How quickly society changes to where car ownership and all the infrastructure required became viewed as some God given right.
> I wonder if at some point we'll look back at the 20th century for what it was: a complete disaster of urban planning as sacrifice to the Church of the Car.
Never, that's when. Some people (not you) actually like to have the space to live in. So you need a car. The goal is not the car, the goal is space.
It's not a disaster at all, it's a breath of fresh air, having space.
> I live in NYC.
You do that, and I'll stay far away from that place. I've been there, I would absolutely loath to live there.
> ....gun....car....crime
You have got to be kidding. The crime rate in cities is much higher, if anything cars reduce crime.
I think there are a few problems with the math but the largest seems to be his costs seem out of whack.
Creating a new road is more expensive than any maintenance/entire repaving since it shouldn't need to be re-graded/piped/utilities dealt with/etc. Sunnyvale in California quotes a variety of prices for street maintenance up to reconstruction and none are over $7/sq foot.[1] And this is in California where constructions costs are usually high compared to the rest of the nation.
Don't most streets with houses on them have houses on both sides of the street? In which case if two houses are each paying 60% the cost of the street on their frontage, isn't there a 20% overage?
I've always wondered why we pave our streets to begin with. Yes, I know that dirt and gravel kick up alot of dust, but the expense of the street itself seems a bit extreme as well.
I can't think of how many times I've seen a new street go in, and just a few weeks later they cut it up and dig up a water line to replace it.
There has to be a better material besides concrete or asphalt that would provide similar benefits.
The other part, while I don't know how you would get around it, seems to be the fact that my car tires are about 10" wide (20" combined). The street in front of my house is 80' wide. Thats an awful lot of space not being used.
"I've always wondered why we pave our streets to begin with."
Dramatic reduction in particulate air pollution.
There have been programs to reduce air pollution in towns along the US - Mexico border. Folks on the US side paid to have roads paved in Mexico so it would reduce pollution--it was cheaper than taking incremental steps on the US side.
I've lived on dirt roads. At this point you only really find them in very rural areas because of their disadvantages.
1) Dirt roads can become almost impassable in bad weather. Everything turns to mud so it's very easy to get stuck or damage your car
2) Dirt roads require a fair amount of maintenance under moderate use. Roads can wash out, have too many rocks, can become lopsided or have gauges in them from car traffic.
3) Its way to damage your car. If you go too fast you can easily blow your oil pan. Dust of course gets into everywhere including the engine.
4) Low speeds. Your max speed is around 20-40 mph in good weather depending on the curves. Bad weather you can easily be going 5 mph. When getting to the town center takes an hour takes an hour, it becomes beneficial to leave roads just because of the increased store traffic.
5) Your vehicle gets incredibly dirty. Those wash me memes are clean in comparison
If you draw a distinction between streets (~access) and roads (~transport) that isn't really a good reason. People around here drive too fast on streets as it is.
I grew up in a rural area with its fair share of dirt/gravel roads.
Vehicles definitely see a lot more wear from driving on dirt roads (beyond the superficial constant dust covering). I expect that the cost of pavement is less than the cost of additional maintenance for all the road's users. (This also explains why it makes sense to leave some dirt roads in very rural areas.)
This depends on amount of traffic, and conditions.
I live in Finland where the population decline in some rural areas has lead to it being economical to remove paving from roads. With not much traffic - but the road still being essential for local economy, e.g. timber transport - it's cheaper to maintain a dirt road than a paving.
Part of this is due to local climate - in the winter the frost goes a meter deep in the ground, so maintaining paving means an occasional re-build every few decades, putting under the tarmac a deep layer of material that passes water through quickly. With dirt roads, you don't need to, you just level it, which is quick and cheap.
I'm sure there are some road users this wouldn't work for, but check out permeable interlocking pavers. I encountered some country roads in Germany that were paved with these for many kilometers. It was a beautiful and pleasant place to ride.
It sounds like you're suggesting there could be gaps in the middle of the lane, so only the area the tyre uses is paved, but that's surely missing the bigger picture:
80' is 7 or 8 lanes for highway traffic! Why is the road so wide?
Interesting opinion.
Americans built free road at the expense of their own future generations.
The author think Americans must stop this spiral and paying the road cost by paying more tax or reduce economic activities by not building and maintaining the road.
Paying more tax would not happens. The Citizen will flee to other states/countries for avoiding high tax(and that place gets free road).
Reducing the economy doesn't work too.
Your future generation unsatisfied the situation(lack of jobs, cultures etc) and flee to other more economically advanced cities/countries(and that place gets free road).
It seems like the yearly cost calculation (19,146.11 /30 years = $638.20) ignores the time value of money. $19,146.11 30 years from now is only worth $5,778.22 today at 4%. The future value of 30 $378.49 yearly payments at 4%/yr is $21,227.59 ..
The cost of resurfacing will probably rise proportional to inflation, so it will cost more to resurface in the future as well .. but couldn't the city invest the funds to get 3-4% over inflation? Also, the yearly tax payments will rise proportionally over time.
I can only speak for my own city, but the cost of building out new roads and infrastructure for new development is paid for not by property taxes, but by the building permits for the development. They actually just had a city council meeting outlining the expected growth over the next 5 years, its expected cost, and the resulting fees for building various types of residential and commercial development.
So the article is correct, that property taxes do not pay for it all. But that is not the only source of revenue.
I don't quite see his argument that this is a ponzi scheme. Wouldn't that mean, if a city stops growing, the whole thing collapses and the streets fall apart?
It seems more like parasitism, where the urban core is burdened with supporting more and more suburbs, and stopping growth is a step toward stability.
I live in an established town. The municipal boundary is about eight square miles. Very few new developments so the author's math doesn't apply. Our roads are maintained by the "tar and chip" approach which is pretty automated. A truck which has both the tar sprayer and the chip spreader drives around town on a regular basis to resurface the roads. Our road has been resurfaced this way about every five years.
The next town over has brick roads. They also need periodic maintenance, but it looks like the same bricks have been in place for a hundred years.
I'm sure that in both cases our taxes ARE paying the cost of the streets.
I don't think zoning and the other minimum requirements are the issue. It's the fact that the longterm costs of sprawl aren't going to be born by the individual, so the individual doesn't consider them.
If the country decides to fight a war that adds another $5K in debt per citizen, most people are oblivious to that.
But if they told you your share for the war will be an extra $100 a month for the next 5 years, you might pay more attention.
By the way, the average taxpayer's share of the national debt is now $161K.
The cost estimates for road construction the author uses are probably roughly the same across the country. Property taxes, on the other hand, vary widely. So at most, he's proving that in Iowa—where property prices are relatively low—there may be an imbalance. But this tells us very little about whether there is a widespread problem. Go to a higher cost of living area, or an area with higher population density, and the math looks very different.
Based on the amount of potholes and cracks on the streets bounding my apartment, I'm almost certain that we (me) aren't paying for the street to be maintained.
What's really illuminating about this article is that it reveals the myopic thinking of a statist. The only solutions proposed are a) increase taxes or b) change spending or c) reduce liabilities. Where is option d) reduce the cost of roads?
It's mentioned in the article that this is about local, city-maintained streets. Unless you live directly on a state or federal highway, those gas taxes, state sales taxes, and income taxes do not go towards the street you live one.
Local sales taxes may, and the author includes these in the diagram of the city budget. Your largest contribution to the maintenance of city infrastructure is in property taxes, either directly or through rent. It's also worth noting that the article only accounts for road surface maintenance. Adding in sewage and water expenses would likely not be favorable.
"this is about local, city-maintained streets. Unless you live directly on a state or federal highway, those gas taxes, state sales taxes, and income taxes do not go towards the street you live one."
This statement in the article is untruthful. The Ames budget he references explicitly lists gas tax money as going to local street maintenance.
The author excluded roads financed by gasoline tax from the analysis. I don't remember reading about sales and income taxes in the article, but perhaps those are in the same category.
My point was that it's not necessarily that there aren't enough taxes, but the problem could be misallocation on bombs and baby boomer pensions. By ignoring the majority of the taxes, this analysis is incomplete.
I'd assume it was miles, not cars, that would govern. 1 car driven 20 miles causes as much wear as 2 cars driven 10 miles each.
Driverless cars may increase total miles driven, by making driving more convenient and shared cars (which many driverless cars would become) increase miles by adding "deadhead" miles to reposition between dropoff X-1 and pickup X.
The analysis seems to include the material and labor costs of building the street. Most peoples' street was already built by the time it became theirs, so, of course their taxes didn't pay for any of the substantial costs that were previously laid out.
Moreover, looking at only a single year's budget would not represent the years with large expenditures on streets, or take into account increased, future amortized payments to cover costs.
Ultimately, we can know that this particular article is invalid because it is representing "long-term costs estimated by unnamed civil engineer as a global average" as "the actual costs of the streets in my city", and "the actual costs of the streets in my city" for "all my city wants to bill me for my streets, even though they actually cost a lot more".
Further, the article never explains who actually paid the costs, nor how this all relates to a claimed Growth Ponzi Scheme, or even evidence of property taxes halving...ever.
I'm guessing this partially depends on region, and is of course partially dependent on both, but what is the primary factor limiting the lifespan of road surfaces: usage or weather (rain, snow, winter salt, etc.)? Certainly, there are some types of city infrastructure that deteriorate less from usage and more so from exposure to the elements over time (telephone poles, bridges, drainage systems). It seems that increased housing density would increase the amount of tax dollars for a given area of land without necessarily increasing the need for more roads or roadway area. One might argue that higher housing density means more cars, but if doubling the number of cars doesn't half the lifespan of the roads, then it's a win. Also, double the housing density doesn't necessarily mean twice the cars, because higher density regions are generally more walkable and there are greater opportunities for carpooling/ride-sharing/public transit.
So, basically, increase housing density so that more people are sharing established infrastructure. Fund the maintenance of this infrastructure using taxes that are population (or perhaps income) dependent, rather than property taxes.
Oh, and based on the cost and longevity numbers provided in the article, why would anyone ever use asphalt over concrete for a roadway surface? I assume some key factor has been left out of this comparison.
[1] http://digitalcommons.tourolaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...